Tweeters,

We spent about 6 hours hiking under beautiful conditions yesterday in the
Sunrise area of Mt. Rainier National Park. We hiked to Skyscraper Pass,
which put us in the 6,400 to 6,800 foot elevation range all day. Our bird
list only totaled 12 species, but we saw several nice species.

Prairie Falcon ? single birds flew past us on 4 occasions and were perhaps
all the same bird.
Mountain Bluebird ? had a flock of at least 25, all individuals in the
gray adult female plumage (see Sibley).
Gray-crowned Rosy-Finch ? had a flock of 250-300 birds working through a
talus slope beneath us that was eventually flushed by the prairie falcon.
Savanna Sparrow ? 3 birds

The most frustrating sighting of the day was seeing a large tight flock of
about 700-800 passerines (perhaps more rosy-finches) on three occasions,
but it was never quite close enough to get positive IDs.

Gary Wiles
Olympia, WA
wilesharkey at yahoo.com


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com